Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday’s election.

On Monday, the American Geophysical Union, the country’s largest association of climate scientists, plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution.

John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, who last May wrote a widely disseminated response to climate change skeptics, is also pulling together a “climate rapid response team,” which includes scientists prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows.

Notice the roles cast for the players by the author. The subject group is “climate scientists.” The object of their activism is “global warming skeptics.” These “scientists” are faced with “rising political attacks.” “Prominent researchers” are threatened with investigations. There’s a shift afoot among “climate scientists, “many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media.” She even names an organization, the American Geophysical Union, which has plans to announce that 700 “climate scientists” have agreed to speak out as “experts.”

This is a propaganda piece attempting to revive the public’s concern over climate change by puffing air into the activism of habitual climate alarmists. The author is an activist trying to create the appearance of a movement. The real news story here is that a mechanical engineering professor from Minnesota is organizing a speaker’s bureau to try to talk down conservative audiences. This is hardly news.

While some of the participants here are, in fact, climate scientists, they are not the ones who have been reluctant to engage the public. Indeed, the charge most aptly arising from last December’s “Climategate” scandal was that several of the most prominent scientists in the alarmist camp were biased politically and were attempting to promote their political aims by manipulating data, skewing peer review, and bullying opponents. When, at the end of the article, the author gets to naming a few of the intrepid scientists who are now uncharacteristically marching forth to brave the slings and arrows of outrageous conservatives, we’re told that Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) will lead the charge, along with Richard Feely of NOAA and Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton. Trenberth, one of those dishonorably named in the Climategate affair, and Oppenheimer were both lead authors on more than one IPCC report and have been active in promoting climate alarmism for years, while Feely has been active in promoting the scare over ocean acidification. Some “shift.”

Next, the author attempts to make you think that all climate scientists agree to this activism by name-dropping the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as the “country’s largest association of climate scientists.” This particular attempt constitutes journalistic malpractice. The AGU does not specialize in climate science; this is misleading. The organization has announced nothing to date, it simply “plans to announce;” and the plans are not sourced by the author. The author, in effect, is creating a ghost army. Notice, in the article, how the entire American Geophysical Union becomes 700 scientists, then shrinks to 39 Special Forces skeptic-refuters, and finally gets named as three special scientists to engage the public. One wonders exactly which box on what survey those 700 AGU members checked in order to be included in this statistic, and whether they know they’ve been named as willing activists in an unprecedented political putsch. Nor would 700 AGU members constitute as large or authoritative a number as it’s represented to be; the AGU boasts some 58,000 members, and they represent all scientific disciplines, not just climate science.

Likewise, John Abraham of St. Thomas University, named in the article as the organizer of a “rapid response team,” is not specifically a climate scientist, either. He’s a mechanical engineer. That does not mean he is not competent to understand climate science, mind you; it’s just that the alarmists invariably sniff at skeptical scientists whose degrees lack the specific “climate” label. I’m returning the favor, and noting that they know perfectly well that disciplines apart from “climate scientist” are competent to comment on the topic.

The article warns of threatened investigations of “prominent scientists.” If you read further in the article, what’s actually been threatened is an investigation of the activism of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has attempted to implement cap-and-trade and central economic planning without the approval of Congress. Recall my article from 2008 discussing their announced plans. If, in fact, this has been accomplished based on deliberately manipulated data, it would constitute the largest attempted power grab in the history of the nation, something along the lines of a political coup. I can’t imagine a responsible citizen not demanding an investigation of such an attempt.

The author of the piece attempts to deflect the Climategate affair as a non-issue by sniffing at it dishonestly:

Climate change skeptics argued that the sniping in some e-mails showed that scientists suppressed research by skeptics and manipulated data. Five independent panels subsequently cleared the researchers involved and validated the science.

This, again, constitutes journalistic malpractice. It’s far from just skeptics who were incensed at the contents of the emails. What was being complained about was a great deal more serious than mere “sniping,” and generated investigations of possible criminal activity. Most importantly, no panel anywhere has discovered that the science was accurate. Some panels have concluded that no crimes were committed, which is a very different thing. And I’m really curious: since the scurrilous behavior uncovered in the emails included systematic attempts to rig professional panels with co-belligerents who would look kindly on the works of alarmists and not critique their work severely, what measures did these “five independent panels” put in place to guarantee to the public that these were not just another series of rigged juries? Indeed, the review of Prof. Michael Mann’s hockey stick high-jinks by his superiors at Penn State (Michael, as in “Mike’s Nature trick”) consisted of nothing more than reviewing a collection of emails hand-selected and submitted by the defendant himself!

The article constitutes political activism dressed as journalism, to cover political activism dressed as research. Dressing up political activism as something more authoritative is the primary tactic of the progressive movement, which has been using science as its sock puppet to change the culture for at least sixty years. Do not be fooled, and do not relax your guard; they’re aiming to steal your liberty.

Postscript: In a move that indicates the genuine shift that is taking place, the Chicago Carbon Exchange, established in November 2000 solely for the purpose of trading carbon emissions credits, announced on October 21 of this year that they will cease operations this year. The event passed without media notice of any significant sort.

10/20/2010 (6:01 pm)

UPDATE, 10/23/10: A reader points out that the claim in the APS response that “the dwell time of CO² in the atmosphere is hundreds of years” is settled science, turns out to be dead wrong. Apparently a simple math error in a calculation in a paper to the British Royal Society incorrectly posits the dwell time in the thousands of years, whereas more accurate, peer-reviewed papers suggest that the actual dwell time is 5 to 10 years. See the discussion here, and note that at least two scientists are now claiming that the pattern of errors regarding CO² is the result of deliberate malfeasance.

Harold Lewis has been a stalwart of American physicists since WWII. He chaired the Physics Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara, wrote award-winning books, chaired committees examining nuclear reactor safety, and was a member in good standing of the American Physical Society for 67 years. That APS tenure ended a couple of weeks ago, announced by a now-famous letter published on the web site of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Science blogger Anthony Watts compares the letter to Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the Wittenburg church door. The letter declares that the “global warming scam” constitutes “the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist,” and details serious mishandling of attempts to examine the scientific evidence dispassionately within the rules of the APS. Dr. Lewis speculates that the reason for the mishandling has to do with the river of government money flowing through organizations that tout the human-generated climate change line.

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

By the way, the letter to members of the APS that Lewis describes can be found at Watts Up With That, here. It’s also worth a read, as it records the opinions of highly-regarded scientists that ClimateGate did, in fact, seriously damage the case supporting global climate change alarmism. Progressive partisans are fond of insisting that it did not.

The APS response to Dr. Lewis’ letter was a masterpiece of issue avoidance. The only claim of Lewis’ that they rebut directly was the one Lewis claimed to have been conjecture — that their reason for handling the topic of climate science in so blatantly unscientific a manner was financial. They basically confirm Dr. Lewis’ description of the machinations they employed in order to avoid a balanced, honest evaluation of the topic.

Regarding the science of climate change, the APS responds as follows:

On the matter of global climate change, APS notes that virtually all reputable scientists agree with the following observations:

* Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere due to human activity;
* Carbon dioxide is an excellent infrared absorber, and therefore, its increasing presence in the atmosphere contributes to global warming; and
* The dwell time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hundreds of years.

On these matters, APS judges the science to be quite clear.

This is a non-response. Basically, the facts, on which they claim that all scientists agree, support the mere claim that man’s contribution to heating the climate is some figure greater than zero. Yes, we all agree that that’s a reasonable claim at this time, given current limits of knowledge. This means nothing, and certainly does not support the alarmist claim in the APS position statement to which Dr. Lewis objected so strongly, which reads in part as follows:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.

If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Compare the facts listed in the first quote block to the alarming claim in the last paragraph of the second quote block, and tell me: what incontrovertible evidence proves that “If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur?” The “incontrovertible” evidence, to which virtually everybody agrees, says only that human contribution is non-zero.

The APS position statement displays the sort of partisanship which has earned global warming alarmists the reputation of abandoning honest science. This is the sort of partisanship which appeared in the now-infamous ClimateGate emails that helped to expose global warming alarmism as a fraudulently-supported power play. Dr. Lewis did well to resign.

The Climate Change Fraud is not dead, but it is coming unglued. Even some hard-core environmentalists are starting to abandon the climate change train. I’ll end with the statement of environmental activist Professor Denis Rancourt, formerly professor of Environmental Science at the University of Ottowa. Three minutes:

Progressives are still aiming at world domination through perverted science (sounds like a plot line from Pinky and the Brain, doesn’t it?) Do not reduce your vigilance.

04/01/2010 (10:42 am)

If the resurrection of Obama’s poisonous health care bill in the wake of the Scott Brown election should teach us anything, it is that a setback does not convince progressive partisans to give up. The case supporting anthropogenic climate change came unraveled over the past 8 months, and properly so, but it behooves us to stay abreast of the topic and keep the pressure on international science organizations to produce the truth using a transparent process.

Four recent data points in the climate science world are worth noticing:

1) The British House of Commons returned the report from their investigation of the East Anglia University email release, called “ClimateGate.” I have not read it yet, but the general chatter suggests that it calls for climate scientists to make their data available for reviewers the way scientists from other disciplines do, and it absolves East Anglia Prof. Phil Jones from any charge of deliberately altering data. If they comply with the call for transparency, this is a good thing.

2) Emails obtained legally from NASA by Freedom of Information Act request indicate that at least one NASA scientist considered their global temperature data less accurate than that produced at East Anglia University. Activist skeptic Christopher Horner obtained the emails from NASA, which contain an observation by NASA’s Dr. Reto A. Ruedy that NASA’s data were less accurate than those maintained by the National Climatic Data Center (NOAA) and by East Anglia University. Phil Jones of East Anglia U apparently agrees that NASA’s data is less reliable than theirs — which we now know to be unreliable as well. And Horner points out that Watts and D’Aleo recently published a report giving reason to doubt the accuracy of NCDC’s data set.

3) Arctic sea ice is on a path to reach normal extent for the spring this year, for the first time since 2001, as defined by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). Anthony Watts and Stephen Goddard produced the evidence, which you can see in part below. Time will tell whether this will be a lasting trend:

4) Finally, note this ominous report from the Washington Examiner, buttressed by Dr. Walter Williams of George Mason University, regarding the publicly-stated intent of leading proponents of anthropogenic global climate change to engage in hard-core propaganda to ruin the reputations of climate change skeptics. This is not old news, as you would imagine, but rather new resolve in the wake of ClimateGate and related exposure of the partisanship of alleged scientists touting human-caused global warming. As is typical for the unstable and immature types who populate the world of progressivism, they regard the recent exposure of the truth as the result of well-funded corporate entities, and perceive that they now have to engage in “street-fighter” tactics.

I’ve noted this effect before: progressives imagine (as in “cook up in their own minds”) that they have been the subject of dirty attacks, although in truth they have not; so they deliberately engage in dirty tactics. This is how they rationalize their routinely criminal or near-criminal behavior. One of the comments, seen in emails obtained through FOIA request, by “scientist” Stephen H. Schneider of the Woods Institute for the Environment illustrates the level of delusion under which they operate:

In a phone interview, Mr. Schneider, who is one of the key players Mr. Inhofe cites, said he disagrees with trying to engage in an ad battle. He said the scientists will never be able to compete with energy companies.

Fifteen Starbucks Coffee Points go to the reader who can recall a single advertisement paid for by an energy company that debunks anthropogenic climate change. The hot water that these faux scientists are in came about because of the actions of unpaid citizen journalists and amateur scientists.

This is the same Stephen Schneider who responded to a Discover magazine interviewer back in 1989:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

He apparently does not trust the public to come to a sound conclusion based on a dispassionate report of the facts. I’ll let you decide how trustworthy any scientific publication from this fellow would be.

03/10/2010 (3:46 pm)

I didn’t even have to examine this one for 10 seconds. This is pure scam.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, alongside the now-completely-discredited chair of the IPCC, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, today announced the launch of an “independent” review of the IPCC’s processes and procedures at a press conference in New York. The review is to be conducted by representatives chosen by the InterAcademy Council, an international consortium representing the national academies of sciences from 15 separate nations. Here is their press release.

The announcement was carried by water-carriers from the Associated Press to the unthinking masses bearing this grotesquely misleading lede (with my emphasis added):

World’s top scientists to review climate panel

UNITED NATIONS (AP) – At a tumultuous time in U.N.-led climate negotiations, one of the world’s most credible scientific groups agreed Wednesday to plug the recent cracks in the authoritative reports of the United Nations’ Nobel Prize-winning global warming panel.

“We enter this process with no preconceived conclusions,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf, a Dutch mathematical physicist who co-chairs the group, the InterAcademy Council of 15 nations’ national academies of science.

Just look at the puffery in that lede. It’s “one of the world’s most credible scientific groups.” They’re reviewing an “authoritative” report, from a “Nobel Prize-winning” panel. They claim they have “no preconceived conclusions.”

There is a well-known, well-established process for correcting errors in scientific research, and This. Is. Not. It. Peer review has served the scientific community for centuries, and will serve here if it is carried out using a fair process with appropriate transparency and without governmental interference.

The AP report is pure propaganda. The IAC is not one of the most credible organizations in the world; it is a politically-oriented entity devoted to international governance. The heads of 15 National Academies of Sciences are 15 political operatives representing 15 governmental liaison bodies. Yes, I imagine they’re all professional scientists of some sort; that does not make these organizations any less political. The men calling for this report are thoroughly discredited already. The United Nations is devoted to internationalization, as is its sister organization, the IAC. They have a dog in the hunt: they both gain immense power from a finding of significant anthropogenic global climate effect. They both should stand a billion miles from the credibility recovery process and let others do the work. We have no reason to expect anything but a sham review that will go through the requisite motions and summarily declare the IPCC report golden.

I am completely disgusted. These frakking criminals are still attempting to co-opt the entire world’s governments by manufacturing “science” in a dishonest manner. They should be in prison for life, and that’s the merciful take. Let’s hope the honest process of peer review continues unmolested, so we can get a clearer take on what effect human activity has on the climate. The UN is not going to provide that, not in a million years.

02/24/2010 (11:56 am)

My position throughout the global climate change kefuffle has been that when the scientists touting anthropogenic climate change begin acting like scientists, I’ll take their science seriously. It was plain to me that they were acting like political partisans, not like scientists.

So it was with cautious satisfaction this morning that I read this Fox News report, about a meeting in Antalya, Turkey of 150 scientists called by the British government’s official Meteorological Office:

After the firestorm of criticism called Climate-gate, the British government’s official Meteorological Office has decided to give its modern climate data a do-over.

At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists in the quiet Turkish seaside resort of Antalya, representatives of the weather office (known in Britain as the Met Office) quietly proposed that the world’s climate scientists start all over again on a “grand challenge” to produce a new, common trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and “rigorous” peer review.

Skepticism and caution are called for; it is certainly possible the same, partisan scientists are attempting to mollify the public so they can produce another biased data set. However, at least on the surface, what the Met Office is calling for is exactly what is needed. If we’re going to know what the climate is doing, a generally-accepted set of fair thermometers is the right place to start.

So, I applaud, while wearing my most skeptical face. We will watch very, very carefully, but if the outcome of this process is actually good science, then “Bravo.”

I’ve revisited some of my prior rants on the subject, to remind myself what it is that about the process so far that seemed so far off the mark. Like this:

Anybody reading this who wants to bring me back to “sanity” from my skeptical stance, needs to produce an explanation for why scientists who claim to believe humans are causing global climate change continue to defend the now-discredited Mann global temperature history, why they sneer at skeptics for their lack of scientific rigor while at the same time excusing the same lack of rigor in popularizers like Al Gore, why they refuse to require that the models used for predicting global climate and for adjusting global temperature readings be made public for the purpose of peer review, why they carefully scrutinize every measurement that does not fit their anthropogenic narrative but accept uncritically every measurement that does fit it, why they tolerate the persecution and firing of dissenters, and why they tolerate the bizarre and obviously political approach of the IPCC. Also, they need to stop accepting nonsense like “an oil company paid for the research” as a valid reason to reject an inconvenient finding; that’s just laughable. If they act like scientists, I’ll treat them like scientists.

There is a scientific debate about climate change, and scientists should continue that debate, but what our culture is facing is not the result of that debate. On the contrary, in the culture at large the debate has been stifled, distorted, and co-opted by political partisans in an attempt to obtain political power.

It’s the very people who engaged in the dishonest peer review process who are defending the hockey stick and similar graphs. If their peer review was not scientifically robust, then those graphs are unsupported, and need to be re-established by a transparent, properly peer-reviewed process.

It has been the skeptics, all along, who represented genuine regard for the scientific process. Anthropogenic global climate change has ridden a wave of biased “journalism” that claimed for itself the imprimatur of science, but which accepted uncritically the deceitful pronouncements of partisans as though they were gospel because at the beginning of the chain of echoes stood somebody wearing a lab coat. If leftists thought for themselves, they would not have been taken in so easily.

Some of us were not taken in. We must remain vigilant against being taken in again. But won’t it be grand if we can actually figure out what the climate is doing, at long last?

01/31/2010 (8:04 pm)

Just when you thought that the IPCC could not look worse, the UK Telegraph reported today that a key claim in the 2007 IPCC report regarding ice melts in the Alps, the Andes, and Africa was based on anecdotal evidence from climbers and the masters thesis of a geography student, neither of them peer-reviewed.

The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

Professor Richard Tol, one of the report’s authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: “These are essentially a collection of anecdotes…

“There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense.”

Tol observes that there were probably no policy decisions based on this particular conclusion, but that’s beside the point. The point is, it’s becoming abundantly clear the IPCC lied about the level of rigor in its reports. The makes both the IPCC and its reports untrustworthy. After ClimateGate, which featured several key authors of portions of the IPCC report, the false claims about Himalayan glaciers, and numerous citations from non-peer-reviewed articles by environmental activist groups, this report makes the IPCC look comical. It will be interesting to see whether the IPCC actually maintains any clout in the coming years.

The entire climate change regime needs to be re-evaluated from the start, by groups of scientists chosen from places not tainted by the recent climate change scandals. More than anything, the conflicts of interest that apparently exist for governments should be publicly acknowledged — climate change can be used to increase governmental power — and information to be used in policy formation should come from sources who are neither personally nor ideologically aligned with increasing the power of government. If there are scientific reasons for humans to change their behavior, the warnings must come without the slightest hint of partisanship — something that is arguably now impossible for the IPCC.

Meanwhile, El Miliband, the UK’s Climate Secretary, demonstrated his purely political point of view by “declaring war” on climate skeptics, minimizing the impact of the deeply embarrassing revelations about the “robust” IPCC report, and calling on those who “take these things seriously” to “organize.” Nice to know they’re concerned about keeping the science pure. [/sarc]

01/29/2010 (5:24 pm)

Part of the continuing fallout from ClimateGate is the awareness that virtually all recent climate research depends on a data set of varying quality that has not been examined by scientists outside of the agency handling it, and over which global warming alarmists appear to have complete control. Researchers are responding by paying much closer attention to the quality of the data — and they’re not happy about what they’re finding.

Anthony Watts and Joe D’Aleo, two retired meteorologists, have combined to produce a report noting serious problems with the base climate data. This report goes far beyond Watt’s original work regarding siting problems with weather stations in the US, although that work is part of the current publication. Watts and D’Aleo were aided by some hard computer work produced by one E.Michael Smith, an Information Technology specialist. D’Aleo is the Executive Director of ICECAP, that useful source of thankfully-not-addled-by-progressive-talking-points climate science. Smith blogs at Musings from the ChiefIO.

What follows is an explanation of one of the chief findings from recent inquiries into the quality of the raw data on which climate research is based. I borrowed a great deal of analysis from Smith’s article from 1/8/2010, entitled “The Bolivia Effect,” and from Marc Sheppard’s article, “Climategate: CRU Was But the Tip of the Iceberg,” cross-posted at the American Thinker and Watts Up With That.

First of all, it is crucial to note that there exists basically one data set containing historical temperature data from stations on the ground, and that’s the data set compiled by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA,) a US federal agency, called the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN). There are three, independent organizations that produce adjusted temperature histories, but they’re all based on more or less the same data, and that data is from GHCN. The three major adjusted histories are named after the places producing them: the Climate Research Unit from East Anglia University (CRU), NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), and the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), also run by the NOAA. There are also two organizations producing climate histories based on satellite readings — Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), a private company supported by NASA, and the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) — but satellite data has only been available since 1979, so the temperature history from the sky is all recent.

The GHCN data is dirty, having been accumulated over many decades from literally hundreds of collections. It begins in 1701 with a single station in Germany. Additional stations appear gradually, until by the mid-20th century the world is crowded with measuring stations reporting, as many as 6,000 of them. Then, suddenly, around 1990 the number of stations drops off dramatically. Also, individual stations come and go; some stations only report for 10 or 20 years, others skip particular months. None of the temperature records span the entire time period of the database. Lots of months are missing.

Here’s a graph showing the number of stations in the GHCN over time, taken from NOAA’s overview of the GHCN data. The solid line is the number of stations reporting average daily temperatures; the dotted line is the number of stations reporting two temperatures daily, the minimum and the maximum temp:

NOAA explains the drop-off in the number of stations as follows:

The reasons why the number of stations in GHCN drop off in recent years are because some of GHCN’s source datasets are retroactive data compilations (e.g., World Weather Records) and other data sources were created or exchanged years ago.

Say what?

That’s not crystal-clear prose, but as near as I can figure, this means somebody had to go back through historical records to reconstruct some of the individual data series, and they’re not finished reconstructing records gathered since 1990. I find that incredibly hard to believe; there’s been somewhere on the order of $50 billion spent by governments studying climate change since 1990. Surely resources have been available to gather data accurately since 1990. And, as we’ll see later in the discussion, it appears as though somebody has gone through the record of individual stations deleting particular stations, and deleting them within a predictable pattern. So, I’m not buying that the drop-off is due to a lag in reconstructing records.

All of us who have been following the climate change debate for a while have seen world graphs from NASA that look like this:

The map purports to show where the globe is getting warmer, where it’s getting cooler, and where it’s staying the same. For most of the last 20 years, these maps have shown that the planet seems to be heating, especially as we approach the north pole. As we will see, however, that’s not exactly what it’s showing us. This will be a lesson in why it is important to know not only what a chart says, but where the data came from, and how the chart was constructed.

These graphs are produced by NASA based on GISS-adjusted data, which (as I just said) is one of three adjusted datasets based on GHCN. They’re apparently generated by a piece of FORTRAN code called GIStemp, which was (finally!) released to the public for inspection in 2007. GIStemp takes a Mercator Projection map of the earth (notice that the poles are as big as the equator, so the sizes of things get more distorted the farther you get from the equator,) and breaks it up into grid boxes of 5° latitude by 5° longitude which, if you do the math, means there are 5,184 separate grid boxes on the map (Smith says there are 8,000 — they must be a hair smaller than 5°, then). Then, it calculates two numbers: 1) the temperature in each box today; and 2) the temperature in each box at some point in the past, which is called the “baseline.” They subtract the baseline temperature from today’s temperature. If the result is positive, it gets displayed in shades of red, darker reds showing greater differences. If the result is negative, it gets displayed in blue, again with darker shades for greater differences. Thus, the world shows up red where it’s getting hotter, and blue where it’s getting colder — if the numbers are meaningful.

The baseline could have been anything the programmers chose, depending on what they wanted to show. In this case, what they wanted to show was a general temperature trend of the planet over a few decades, so they picked a series of years not too far into the past, 1951-1980, and made the program calculate the average temperature for each grid box in those years. It uses an average because the temperature tends to rise and fall dramatically (as we all notice every day), and averaging over a group of years gets rid of these normal variations which statisticians would call “noise.” The result is a graph of what they call “anomalies”: temperatures getting hotter, colder, or staying the same when compared to the average temperature from 1951-1980.

What does the program do if there’s no thermometer anywhere in a grid box?

What it does is attempt to figure the temperature from nearby grid boxes where there are actual temperature readings. It picks up to 5 grid boxes and tries to get a temperature from them, averaging them with (I think) a weight for distance. The maximum distance from which it can borrow a temperature is 1200 km, or about 750 miles.

Immediately, I see two problems. The first is that 750 miles can produce a dramatic difference in altitude or regional climate. If you’ve got a thermometer at Los Angeles International Airport, and you want the temperature for a grid box located in the High Sierra, borrowing the temp from the airport is not going to give you a reasonable reading. It becomes important to understand where the thermometers are placed.

The second problem is even larger: what happens if there was a thermometer in the grid box during the baseline period, but not today, or vice versa? If I was programming this and I found that condition, I’d try to recalculate the baseline to use the same stations as were used to calculate the current temperature; but that may not be possible because the stations come and go over time.

What the GIStemp programmers did was ignore the condition. They calculate the baseline using thermometers available during that period, and calculate today’s temperature using thermometers available now. And this is where the problem of the disappearing stations comes in.

You see, E. Michael Smith, the programmer who’s evaluating the GHCN database, says there’s a pattern to which stations have disappeared from the data set, according to Marc Sheppard at the American Thinker:

Perhaps the key point discovered by Smith was that by 1990, NOAA had deleted from its datasets all but 1,500 of the 6,000 thermometers in service around the globe.

Now, 75% represents quite a drop in sampling population… Yet as disturbing as the number of dropped stations was, it is the nature of NOAA’s “selection bias” that Smith found infinitely more troubling.

It seems that stations placed in historically cooler, rural areas of higher latitude and elevation were scrapped from the data series in favor of more urban locales at lower latitudes and elevations. Consequently, post-1990 readings have been biased to the warm side not only by selective geographic location, but also by the anthropogenic heating influence of a phenomenon known as the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI).

For example, Canada’s reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991, with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to one. That’s right: As Smith wrote in his blog, they left “one thermometer for everything north of LAT 65.” And that one resides in a place called Eureka, which has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to its unusually moderate summers.

Smith also discovered that in California, only four stations remain – one in San Francisco and three in Southern L.A. near the beach…

The baseline is 1951-1980. The Big Deletion occurred around 1990. So all around the world, baselines are being calculated using data from actual thermometers, and then current temperature is being computed based on a temperatures borrowed from stations as far as 750 miles away — stations apparently selected for their warmth.

Take our hypothetical grid box in the High Sierra. If there was a thermometer there in the 1950s, but not today, the baseline was measured in the mountains, and the current temperature is being measured at the beach. Of course there will be a warming trend, if the deleted stations are disproportionately from high elevations and high latitudes.

Smith has evaluated every major area of the globe, and they all show the same pattern: there were real thermometers reporting from the cooler and higher areas during the baseline period, but today’s temperature is being borrowed from stations in warmer areas.

So, with that knowledge in hand, let’s look at the anomaly map again. Just below the anomaly map, I’ve inserted a GIStemp output produced by Smith showing where the actual measuring stations are located today. The second map is from a year and a half earlier, but I’m not including it to compare temperatures, just to show which readings are real and which are borrowed:

Do you see the large, red spot over the middle of South America in the full-map GIStemp display, showing extreme warming? It’s the result of deleting stations that were located in the mountains of Bolivia, and substituting for it stations on the coast or in the Amazon.

Do you see the extreme warming around the Arctic Circle? It’s largely the result of losing temperature stations around the Arctic Circle, and replacing them with proxies located far south of there.

This is only one of the problems reported by Watts and D’Aleo. They also complained about the pre-analysis adjustment of raw data from GHCN which is carried out by each of the major reporters (CRU, GISS, and NCDC, remember?) before they plot their data. There’s a certain amount of adjustment that’s required, of course; they need to filter out differences due to different altitudes, measurements taken at different times of day, or proximity to cities which get hotter than the surrounding countryside, and they need to fill in missing months. They also need to adjust for known station events, like differences caused by switching the type of instrument used to record the temperature, or caused by moving the station.

The problem is, nobody has peer-reviewed the adjustments, and virtually all the adjustments go in the same direction. Global temperature is falling, if you go by the raw data, but it’s rising steadily after adjustments. There are plausible-sounding reasons for the adjustments, but in the wake of the revelations of partisan animus in ClimateGate, can we take that for granted? And since the standard advanced by the climate alarmists themselves dismisses anything not peer-reviewed (as is the norm for scientific pursuits), why should we take it for granted?

Watts and D’Aleo also complain about the lack of standards for handling the data, the improper siting of temperature-recording stations, the number of stations located near airports, changes in adjustments that fail to account for Urban Heat Island effects (those warm urban areas again,) problems in the way data are merged from separate stations, changes in the methods of taking ocean surface temperatures, and several other issues. The sum of their analysis is simply, “the data are a mess.”

Is the globe actually warming? It’s really impossible to say. The presentation of the data has made it seem that way, but it’s not a valid measurement. Bad data means bad results, always. The solution is to start afresh, but with lots of public eyes watching the process this time. After ClimateGate, and after the IPCC debacle, no results produced so far are solid.

01/28/2010 (11:43 pm)

…not that we all trusted it so far. But a lot of people did. To the rest of us, there were clear indications that the published results were driven by a political agenda rather than by the actual science provided by the participating scientists.

First it was uncritical acceptance of the Mann Hockey Stick temperature history, which was subsequently dropped. Accepting it in the first place in lieu of NASA’s GISS temperature history seemed on the surface to be justified mostly by a desire to make the claim of warming more dramatic. When it became apparent that the scientists who produced the temperature history had munged their calculations due to a lack of expertise in statistics, the IPCC was embarrassed and the next report had to find another source for historical temperatures.

Then East Anglia University researcher Keith Briffa was forced, against his will, to release the tree ring data on which he had long been basing his claim that proxies supported the Hockey Stick version of climatic warming — and it was discovered that he had based his research on a tiny, cherry-picked sample that showed a much more dramatic warming than broader available samples.

Then Climategate. ‘Nuff said.

And now, over the last two weeks, people finally began auditing the latest official IPCC report carefully, and discovered that it contains claims that are completely unsupported by any scientific research — and much worse. It’s not just that the alarming claim in the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report for policy makers published in 2007 (hereafter “AR4″) that the glaciers in the Himalayas, on which much of India relies for its water, will be gone by 2035 turns out to have been nothing but speculation based on an interview published in a popular magazine. That would have been bad enough; the IPCC maintains that all claims in its reports are backed by robust, peer-reviewed science. It’s not just that the claim is dead wrong, and every scientist familiar with glaciers knows it. The glaciers are losing 2-3 feet of ice per year, and the smallest Himalayan glacier is almost 400 feet thick; do the math. And it’s not just that the scientist who wrote the claim into AR4 admitted knowing that it was not peer-reviewed, but included it in order to put pressure on world leaders; that’s a great deal worse, because it vindicates the fears of skeptics around the world. Now it’s become clear that the Chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri of India, profited personally from the fear generated by the Himalaya glacier alarm — the institute he founded and runs, TERI (Enery and Resources Institute, New Dehli,) used that same claim in order to obtain millions of euros and hundreds of thousands of dollars in research funds to study the humanitarian impact of the glaciers melting.

And the hits just keep on rolling. Last Sunday, the UK Times noted that Roger Pielke Sr. and Robert Muir-Wood, experts on disaster claims assessment, charged the IPCC AR4 with misrepresenting Muir-Wood’s 2006 research. The IPCC claimed that damage caused by storms was increasing due to global warming, and cited Muir-Wood’s paper as support. Not only is the paper not peer-reviewed, but the IPCC misrepresented what it said: the author and his associates emphasized that they cannot claim that global warming is causing any more damage, and that in fact the evidence suggests that it is not.

Monday, researchers noted that the World Wildlife Fund (henceforth WWF, with only incidental reference to the World Wrestling Federation, which may in fact be a more rigorous scientific body,) is cited more than a dozen times in AR4. WWF is an activist group, not a scientific body; its articles are not peer-reviewed and it grinds a partisan axe. Yet the AR4, that Nobel-winning document based entirely on peer-reviewed science, uses WWF documentation to support claims that tourism development is destroying ecosystems in Central America, that glacial melting is increasing the incidence of destructive mudflows and avalanches, that climate change is causing rapid glacier retreat in mountain ranges around the world, and a number of other ecological disasters. Oddly, no instances of studies from the Heritage Foundation were discovered in AR4. (Aside I note, ya gotta love the name of Donna Laframboise’s blog that reported on the WWF citations: No Frakking Consensus dot blogspot dot com. Snort.)

Tuesday, Dellingpole at the UK Times piled on, pointing out that AR4′s claim that 40% of the rain forests in the Amazon may be sensitive even to slight variations in rainfall (which global warming will produce, of course) was supported only by a WWF document — one written by a government policy analyst and a freelance journalist.

The volume of information discrediting the IPCC reports is becoming large enough to tip the public perception in the direction of skepticism. The number of Americans who believe that the threat of global warming is exaggerated jumped from 35% to 41% in just the last year, according to Gallup; it will be interesting to see what happens to that number in the wake of the latest flurry of reports.

Scientists are already responding, of course. NASA has quietly removed references to the Himalaya glaciers melting (also removing it’s own embellishment, predicting their melting by 2030 instead of 2035 as predicted in AR4). An agency of the British government has quietly corrected its own report that was based on the same misrepresentation of Robert Muir-Wood’s paper that the IPCC published. And a major Canadian global warming alarmist, Andrew Weaver, earns the unenviable label of “the first rat to abandon the sinking ship,” calling for a change of leadership at the IPCC and for institutional reform.

Meanwhile, progressives around the globe are scurrying to patch up the damage — further demonstrating the stark, political nature of global warming alarmism. Lawrence Solomon of the Financial Times, who wrote that fabulous Denier’s Series about the leading scientists who doubt global warming alarmism, has been documenting how Wikipedia articles on global climate change get rewritten on the spot whenever skeptical claims appear. Wikipedia’s reaction was to restrict one particularly active administrator, but apparently his cohort has picked up the slack and articles representing skeptical science keep getting overwritten.

Google, also, has been jimmying the record to aid their ideological fellows in the sciences. Solomon, again, reported that Google has been severely limiting access to articles discussing ClimateGate, and serves up search results downplaying the implications of the emails and focusing instead on the alleged criminal violations of the leakers. My search bar now contains Bing.

The important take from the series of incidents, though, is that the political nature of the IPCC is becoming evident to the general public. There are good reasons to hope that the days of perceiving the IPCC as “the consensus of climate scientists” are over. Keep spreading the word: the IPCC reports are not science, nor are they politics, they’re politics masquerading as science.

UPDATE, 1/29: Add Greenpeace to the list of cited sources in AR4. But still no Heritage Foundation. Go figure.

12/17/2009 (11:44 am)

The English edition of Ria Novosti yesterday ran an article reporting that on Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis published a paper claiming that the embattled Hadley Center for Climate Change Research had probably tampered with their data from Russian surface stations deliberately to make the warming of the planet seem more believable.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.

Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.

Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century…

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

Here are the caveats:

First of all, nobody I know of has read the actual report, which is published in Russian using Cyrillic lettering. The scientific bloggers are asking for help translating, so they can perform this task and find out what’s really been said. Second, the IEA appears to be a Russian think tank, probably along the lines of the Heritage Foundation. I do not know anything about their politics, nor about their reputation, nor about their involvement in the climate change debate generally. And third, the claim that the data were selected deliberately is difficult to prove, resting, as it does, on an assertion regarding the intent of the scientists that cannot be known with certainty. The facts say only that the Hadley Center’s dataset reports only 25% of Russian surface stations, and that those 25% have a warm bias; they don’t say that there exists no plausible explanation for the selectiveness other than deliberate manipulation.

That said, the Climategate story does provide a backdrop of factual evidence against which the assertion rings true that these particular scientists have been manipulating the data to produce a specific effect. The scientists at the Hadley Center have been refusing to release the raw data on which they based their adjusted data set, and have not published anything meaningful regarding how the data were adjusted, so they cannot be checked by appropriate peer review. Reports that the raw data have been destroyed did not help their credibility. Some of the commented data files in the Climategate ftp file suggest a filtering process about which calling it “haphazard” represents comic understatement (google HARRY READ ME). And according to Steve MacIntyre at Climate Audit, an email from Dr. Phil Jones to Dr. Michael Mann in 2004 from the Climategate set highlights Jones’ manipulation of the peer review process to stifle discussion of the Russian data:

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

The Russian data are particularly important to the case that the earth is warming as told in the HadCRUT data set, the data set generated by the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University. According to Jeff Id, guest-posting at Watt’s Up With That (with his emphasis, not mine),

This is a very powerful accusation, which if true could change much about the climate science debate. Many papers are based on this dataset which has the highest trend of the major ground datasets.

The graphical illustration below, borrowed from Id’s article and representing global temperatures as reported in the HadCRUT data set for 2003, shows significant hot spots over Europe and what looks like the Ural mountains in Russia. If, as is allegedly reported in the IEA paper, the actual readings from Russia show no warming trend at all, the case for the claim that the globe is actually warming becomes much less credible. This is the same point being made by Andrew Watt’s Surface Stations Project, which has reported that possibly as much as half of the reported warming of the 20th century is the result of urban encroachment around temperature reading stations that has not been accounted for in adjustments for the urban heat island effect. Click on the image for a larger, clearer image.

In related news, the UK Guardian reports that the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate, Ed Miliband, warned from the Copenhagen summit meeting that the draft agreement was badly behind schedule, and that the delay, as 115 world leaders descend on the conference expecting to discuss a draft political document, threatens to turn the conference into “a farce.” My own reaction is that far more than just the failure to reach an agreement threatens to farsify the Copenhagen summit.

12/16/2009 (10:39 am)

Tomorrow morning, delegates at the Copenhagen climate change summit will read in the newspaper of the meeting the following message from the people of the United States, courtesy of American Solutions:

In America, We Have a Constitution.
It Begins: “We the People”

Our Constitution Requires International Agreements to
Be Agreed Upon By our Senate

Our President Does Not Have Support in our Senate for
Binding Carbon Emissions Limits

Our Environmental Protection Agency Recently Asserted It Has the
Power to Impose Carbon Emissions Limits

Such Action would be Tantamount to our Executive Branch Taxing the American People without
Approval from the Elected Representatives in our Legislative Branch

That’s Called “Taxation without Representation” and
We Will Not Stand for it

The American Revolution and a Famous Tea Party in
Boston in 1773 Was About Rejecting Taxation without Representation

We Reject Taxation without Representation even if it
is attempted by our President through an international “political” agreement like the Copenhagen 15

Through Our Election Process, our Presidents, Representatives, and Administrators Are
Accountable to the American People

Unlike Other Countries, We Do Not Have a Democracy Deficit

In America, Mesdames and Messieurs, We the People Govern

Appropriate thanks to Newt Gingrich at American Solutions. This is a clear declaration, and I’ll stand by it.

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